Old and New Masters eBook

At the same time, Mr. Conrad’s is not a genius
without parentage or pedigree. His father was
not only a revolutionary, but in some degree a man
of letters. Mr. Conrad tells us that his own acquaintance
with English literature began at the age of eight
with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which his
father had translated into Polish. He has given
us a picture of the child he then was (dressed in
a black blouse with a white border in mourning for
his mother) as he knelt in his father’s study
chair, “with my elbows on the table and my head
held in both hands over the pile of loose pages.”
While he was still a boy he read Hugo and Don Quixote
and Dickens, and a great deal of history, poetry, and
travel. He had also been fascinated by the map.
It may be said of him even in his childhood, as Sir
Thomas Browne has said in general of every human being,
that Africa and all her prodigies were within him.
No passage in his autobiography suggests the first
prophecy of his career so markedly as that in which
he writes: “It was in 1868, when nine years
old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of
Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank
space then representing the unsolved mystery of that
continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance
and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my
character now: ’When I grow up I shall
go there.’” Mr. Conrad’s genius,
his consciousness of his destiny, may be said to have
come to birth in that hour. What but the second
sight of genius could have told this inland child that
he would one day escape from the torturing round of
rebellion in which the soul of his people was imprisoned
to the sunless jungles and secret rivers of Africa,
where he would find an imperishable booty of wonder
and monstrous fear? Many people regard Heart
of Darkness as his greatest story. Heart of
Darkness surely began to be written on the day
on which the boy of nine “or thereabouts”
put his finger on the blank space of the map of Africa
and prophesied.

He was in no hurry, however, to accomplish his destiny.
Mr. Conrad has never been in a hurry, even in telling
a story. He has waited on fate rather than run
to meet it. “I was never,” he declares,
“one of those wonderful fellows that would go
afloat in a washtub for the sake of the fun.”
On the other hand, he seems always to have followed
in his own determined fashion certain sudden intuitions,
much as great generals and saints do. Alexander
or Napoleon could not have seized the future with a
more splendid defiance of reason than did Mr. Conrad,
when, though he did not yet know six words of English,
he came to the resolve: “If a seaman, then
an English seaman.” He has always been obedient
to a star. He likes to picture himself as a lazy
creature, but he is really one of the most dogged
day-labourers who have ever served literature.
In Typhoon and Youth he has written
of the triumph of the spirit of man over tempest and